Everything is different now for Mizzou basketball
The start of the 2021-22 college basketball season is still nearly five months away. Players have been back on campus for just a couple of weeks going through workouts and having dinners together to get to know one another. But one thing that is true today will be true when the season begins as well:
“We don’t really know much so we’re just taking it day by day,” junior guard Jarron “Boogie” Coleman said.
Coleman was talking about the players. “Pretty much, we’re all like freshmen.” But the statement could just as easily apply to the Missouri fanbase. Like most of college basketball this year, the Tiger roster looks almost completely different than it did a year ago thanks to the transfer portal.
Jon Rothstein reported last weekend that 1,663 players had entered the portal this year. There are only 4,550 available Division One scholarships in the country every year. Not every player who entered the portal was leaving a Division One program, but that number represents about a third of the country's players were looking for a new home.
Few programs were more active in the portal—in both directions—than Missouri. Out went Xavier Pinson, Torrence Watson, Parker Braun, Mark Smith and Dru Buggs. In came Coleman, Amari Davis, DaJuan Gordon and Ronnie DeGray III. The end result is a roster returning 43.4 minutes per game, 20.4% of its scoring and 27.1% of its rebounding from a year ago. And the head coach can’t wait.
“It’s exciting for our staff,” Cuonzo Martin said, while joking (we think) that he had to give his wife pictures so she knew who was who when the players came to their house. “You have so many new guys, kind of go back to the drawing board, look over notes. You teach in a classroom. It’s not as if you have so many older guys, returning guys, they kind of teach the class for you. You’re teaching the class for the first time and it’s fun.”
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So, yes, Missouri’s team will look almost completely different than it did the last time we saw it in an opening round NCAA Tournament loss to Oklahoma in March. That’s been known since the final buzzer sounded that night. Whether it’s good, bad or indifferent rests largely on the shoulders of the quartet of portal replacements the Tigers brought in.
“I would say it’s an easier transition,” Davis, a combo guard transferring in from Green Bay, said. “Maybe like two or three guys came back from last year so they kind of needed just like some help getting the team together and stuff. Me being an upperclassman, I have to take up and take that role being one of the leaders on the team.”
Davis said the transition should be easier because everyone is going through it. Nobody has to worry about fitting in as the new guy because everyone is the new guy.
“I feel like I’ve already been here for a year,” DeGray III, who averaged 8.7 points and 4.6 rebound at Massachusetts as a freshman, said. “We all get along. We’ve been with each other and we all crack jokes with each other and hang out with each other outside of basketball.”
DeGray is an outlier in this transfer class: He’s the only one who had seen the campus prior to last week. He took an unofficial visit to Mizzou as a high school prospect.
“It was really important because they weren’t letting visits until June,” he said. “Already being able to see here really helped my influence and being able to be more comfortable because I’ve seen what’s around here.”
For the other three members of the transfer class, everything is completely new. Everything.
“I have to say the campus,” Davis said. “Green Bay, it was kind of like all in one area. Out here it’s a big campus. We got our own hospital. The campus is real big. I think I got lost one time. I’m still figuring it out.”
“They can only show you so many things. It looks all nice on the camera, but once you get here everything is new,” Coleman said. “I’ve always been in Indiana. I’ve only been to St. Louis for AAU tournaments. I’ve never really been in Missouri so just simple things like the street lights. Everything’s different to me. I’m taking in everything and loving it.”
So they will spend the summer simply trying to get to know one another as well as their new home.
“These guys are all business. They want to be good,” Martin said. “They spend a lot of time together. They’ve been magnets to each other right away, just how they communicate with each other, how they hang around each other, go to the gym together. It’s one thing for a guy to come in on his own, but to gather your teammates together, two or three guys come in, that’s special. They put the time into it right now. Hopefully that’s consistent.”
The everything is brand new feeling might not wear off for a while. It may take some time to get used to a new campus, new coaches, new teammates, even a new climate (“Green Bay is real cold. This is a big change for me,” Davis said). But eventually, full practices and the season will start. And at that point, the one thing that is a constant will return.
“I played college basketball already. I played in the Big 12,” Gordon, a Kansas State transfer, said. “I already know how things go. Now it’s up to me just playing well and being in the right situation.”
Missouri’s other three transfers are coming from the Horizon, the Mid-American and the Atlantic 10 conferences. Unlike Gordon, they’re moving up a level to high-major basketball night in and night out.
“I think that teams will be deeper,” DeGray said. “I don’t think it will be too much difference because at the end of the day it’s still basketball.”
Eventually, everything won’t be so new. The players will settle in and the fans will get to know them. While hand-wringing over the transfer portal and what it is doing to college basketball has been the standard stance this offseason, Martin has embraced the chance at a clean slate. After all, change isn’t always a bad thing.
“Sometimes the grass isn’t always greener,” DeGray said. “But it’s definitely been greener here.”
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